Begonia urophylla

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Begonia urophylla, photographed by Todd Boland — fig. a Todd Boland, CC BY 4.0 / 2014-02-15 / obs. 11918014

Begonia urophylla, photographed by desertnaturalist — fig. b desertnaturalist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182149688

Begonia urophylla, photographed by Jorge I. Merchán Mayorga — fig. d Jorge I. Merchán Mayorga, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 186245721

Begonia urophylla, photographed by Nicolás Baresch Uribe — fig. e Nicolás Baresch Uribe, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185942093

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 2955995
Filed as: Begonia urophylla Hook.
Det. by: Smith, Lyman B., (US), NMNH
Collected: R. L. Liesner, A. C. González, B. G. Stergios & G. A. Aymard 1982-03-16
Origin: VE
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Begonia urophylla, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Colombia	CLM	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Costa Rica	COS
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Panamá	PAN
Venezuela	VEN
Mexico Southeast	MXT	NORTHERN AMERICA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 96 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	9.7 °C	14.6 °C	21.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.9 °C	21.5 °C	27.4 °C
Annual rainfall	2,077 mm	2,831 mm	4,256 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	56 mm	88 mm	330 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 96 research-grade observations of Begonia urophylla that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 8 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Begonia boquetensis Irmsch.
Begonia santae-martae Irmsch.
Begonia setifera A.DC.
Begonia squamosa C.DC.
Begonia villipetiola C.DC.
Gireoudia setosa Klotzsch ex Klotzsch
Gireoudia setosa Klotzsch
Gireoudia urophylla (Hook.) Klotzsch

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.